Celtic Returns, Prog on the Side, Experiment into Ambient

We’ve got a lot of new music from old friends today on Echoes. Clannad, the legendary Irish band and one of the groups that launched the Celtic renaissance in the 1980s, returns with their first album in 15 years. It’s called Nádúr, Gaelic for nature, and it brings the core members of Clannad back together, including singer Moya Brennan, for those lush harmonies that have made songs like “Theme from Harry’s Game” so enduring.

Jeff Greinke’s career isn’t as storied as Clannad’s, but he’s been releasing ambient and experimental recordings since the mid-1980s. He has returned with an album that is his most accessible and also most beautiful. Scenes from a Train is a gorgeous and subtle album of ambient chamber music with Greinke using live, mostly acoustic musicians. It’s the last song of the night so stay up for it. But even if you don’t it’s in heavy rotation so you’ll be hearing it a lot.

Colin Edwin returns to the show. He’s the bassist for Porcupine Tree and we heard him extensively earlier this year on the album he recorded with Jon Durant, Burnt Belief. On a new EP he teams up with Italian drummer/multi-instrumentalist Alesandro Pedretti. If you liked Burnt Belief, you’ll like the dark, throbbing but melodic moves of this self-titled EP, Endless Tapes.

Finally, Kitaro returns with a new album, Final Call. It’s an ominous title and when I got that as the subject line in a promotional email, I thought I had missed out on something. Kitaro has retired from his thus far four volumeSacred Journey of Ku-Kaitrek to make an album that contemplates the state of the world. You’ll hear all the Kitaro signatures here, but the cut we]’ll play tonight is a little different. Kitaro has always been lumped in with space music, but he’s rarely used that iconic sequencer sound of Tangerine Dream and Klaus Schulze. But he does on a track called “Traveler.”

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